Dec. 5 Open Thread: Republicans Now Undermining Democracy Openly

Filed in National, Open Thread by on December 5, 2018

The pending collapse of Trump, and the party that tied itself to his mast, has flushed out the rats from belowdeck, carrying only what they can stuff into their cheeks.

The GOP abandoned the strategy of appealing to the public in about 1982, when it became clear that Reagan’s voodoo economics would not produce its boldly predicted results. Rather than bowing to reality and finding a more responsible path forward, Republicans decided they would impose their discredited policies by whatever means necessary, launching a 35-year battle to restrict voting rights. Once you decide the majority should not rule, everything is on the table, and with their ship listing Republicans no longer have time to disguise their motivations. In moves that have even legacy media using the term power grab, both Wisconsin and Michigan are following North Carolina’s example by using lame-duck sessions under their outgoing Republican governorsstrip power from those governors. In Wisconsin’s case powers that were conferred on the office only at the beginning of Scott Walker’s first term. It cannot be stated enough: The GOP does not believe the majority should rule.

It’s an exciting day for those following Treasongate, as Muellerologists study the heavily redacted Mike Flynn sentencing recommendation for clues about where the Deep State’s point man is heading. This analysis, from Wired magazine, is the best I could find. Those who don’t understand the public fascination with the entire Trump saga probably can’t understand how Harold Robbins and Jackie Collins sold so many novels, either.

One under-appreciated reason for the GOP’s midterm disaster was the post-Parkland collapse of the NRA as a factor in elections. With the spotlight on Russian oligarch cash flowing into Republican campaigns, the kleptocrats sat on their wallets this year, and the gunmakers’ lobbying arm suffered a $55 million drop in donations. Turns out that those suburban women who don’t like Trump don’t like loose gun laws, either.

This one’s just for RE Vanella: Never call a bad goaltender a dog, because dogs make good goalies — very good goalies.

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  1. Our first dog was a Sheltie. We used to bring him when we picked up our girls from school. He loved to play goalie. He couldn’t be faked out b/c his eyes never left the ball. Of course, his ‘opponents’ were kindergarten kids, but still…

  2. Alby says:

    On the Treasongate front, I missed this story last week speculating that the Guardian’s exclusive about a Manafort-Assange meeting in London might have been fraudulent, planted by opponents seeking to discredit the reporter.

    https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/11/28/paul-manafort-julian-assange-222694

  3. I’ve said it for some time, and it’s never been more true–The Republican Party is nothing more than a criminal conspiracy at this point.

  4. Alby says:

    I find it satisfying that a Children’s Crusade exposed the NRA as a paper tiger — or, rather, a paper bear.

  5. bamboozer says:

    As noted the games in Wisconsin and Michigan are carbon copies of North Carolina’s Republican attacks on the governorship once they lost. As expected their trying to destroy as much as they can before being shown the door. There can be no dealing with these people, it’s fight or die and I don’t intend to die. As for Mueller the mighty I found his recommending little or no jail time for Flynn to be telling, Flynn gave up everything and the world can’t wait to find out what it was. I know I can’t.

  6. RE Vanella says:

    HISTORY IS NOW

    By: Nathan J Robinson

    https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/11/history-is-now

    One of history’s main lessons is “don’t be the person who grudgingly accepts the inevitability of atrocious things.” The liberals who cautioned Martin Luther King to “go slow” were cowards, and the civil rights protesters changed the country by refusing to tolerate the intolerable. The people who gathered and attacked the first black family who moved to Cicero, Illinois… these were not the people you want to be. Same with the ordinary Germans who were afraid to speak up each contributed to a human catastrophe, and today we admire those like Sophie Scholl and the Man Who Wouldn’t Heil. (He has an equivalent today: Jordan Blue, the bullied gay student who refused to participate when his fellow students all decided to do the Nazi salute.) The “good men who do nothing” are not very good at all, because being good in part depends on what you do in response to your circumstances.

    I am not saying that “everyone must be an activist.” Many people do not have the time or health. But I do think knowledge confers duty: As we try to look at our lives from the perspective of future people, aliens, or ourselves on our deathbeds, what decisions do we think we should make? I am not religious, but I often wonder how I would “justify myself” if there were a day of judgment. What were you for? What good were you? Did you sit idly by? I believe strongly that life should be full of pleasure, and that there’s nothing helpful about living every day wracked with guilt over things you haven’t done. But I also know that history doesn’t just happen. It’s made by the sum total of the things people do, and I am a person, and you are a person, and we are the ones who decide what we do. 62,000 people lived rather than died because Carl Lutz was a good person who used his opportunities well. Because we are limited by our context, we each have constraints to our actions (I cannot go back and become Carl Lutz), but those constraints are also unknowable, and the only way to guarantee that a project fails is to resign yourself to its failure.

    Subscribe to Current Affairs. I subscribe. It’s good stuff.

  7. RE Vanella says:

    knowledge confers duty…